Wherever we go, there we are

We’re enjoying how easy it is to explore Siwa Oasis on foot. You can walk to many fascinating landmarks, monuments and springs around the oasis, including Gebel el Dakrur, a collection of peaks that stands out in the desert landscape.

Gebel el Dakrur from the edge of the Shali, Siwa Oasis. Photo by Alan.Gebel el Dakrur from the very top of the Shali.

Gebel el Dakrur is not terribly far from where we stay – a little over three kilometers – but we like to take the longer, more picturesque way, so it can take us as long as an hour to reach it.

As you approach Gebel el Dakrur from nearby Cleopatra Spring (one of the most famous bathing spots in the oasis), you see a mosque and a collection of buildings, some in use, some seemingly abandoned, and quite a few falling to ruin. There are also a couple of big, open fields with signs of cooking fires. This is the location of Eid al Siyaha, the yearly festival of peace and friendship that’s held every autumn in Siwa Oasis.

Several people have told us about Eid al Siyaha, and you can find videos of it on YouTube. It is a three-day event to which all Siwans are invited. Adult women stay home, but even so, that’s a lot of people – the population of Siwa Oasis is said to be about 27,000. Siwans take part in religious celebrations and rituals meant to bind everyone together in a spirit of sharing and fellowship. Abubakr, the gentleman who looks after the Siwa House museum, explained it to us this way: “Perhaps I have a disagreement with someone. We shake hands and say, ‘okay, it’s finished.’ But something remains in the heart. Then at Eid al Siyaha, we see each other, we embrace and kiss each other, and our hearts are cleaned. Everything is clean.”

Yusuf, the owner of the place where we’re staying, has told us about how much fun the festival is. People sleep out under the stars for the duration of the festival, there’s lots of food, and Sufis come to lead the singing and chanting. The men of the village donate huge amounts of food, enough to feed everyone, and also do all the cooking for everyone. It’s all volunteer labor, and a huge collaborative effort. “You feel very good there,” Yusuf said.

At this time of year, though, Gebel el Dakrur is pretty much empty of people, and feels very quiet as you approach. Drawn by the changing colors of the peaks, and their fantastical shapes sculpted by wind, we climbed up slowly the first time, inspecting the variations in the rock, and noticing seams of white running horizontally between layers. Some of it was crumbling away, and soon we realized we were looking at fossils of seashells, compressed into layers of white crumbly material between the layers of sandlike stone.

Fascinating shapes sculpted by the wind at Gebel el Dakrur.Layer upon layer of sands and fossilized marine life.Closeup of layered sands and fossilized marine life.

Scattered on the ground around us, and clustered against rocks, were fossilized bivalve shells with strongly marked ridges, and even more that were irregular in shape, like oyster shells we’ve seen on beaches.

Cluster of marine fossils

A single fossilized bivalve shellFossilized clams

We were both thrilled when we found fossils of sand dollars, just like we’re thrilled when we find sand dollars on the beach in Oregon.

I even found a fossil of undersea foliage, with delicate veining.

While the fossils remind you how ancient life on Earth really is, you also get reminders that human beings have been here in the desert and oasis for a long time. Like many of the mountains around the oasis, Gebel el Dakrur has a number of old tombs. Unlike some of the tombs at Gebel al Mawta to the northeast of downtown Siwa, there aren’t any paintings left (or at least, none have been identified as far as I know), but the tombs are interesting anyway.

The largest tomb we entered had some interesting graffiti near the entrance.

Graffito dated 31 August 1959

Besides the fossils and tombs, Gebel el Dakrur offers spectacular views of the entire oasis, in every direction. To the south is the Great Sand Sea of the Sahara; to the east, there’s the huge salt lake and a number of villages, some inhabited, some abandoned. To the north are spectacular hills, and to the west, another huge salt lake, and less than 50 kilometers beyond that, the Libyan border.

View of the southern part of Siwa Oasis, with part of Gebel el Dakrour in the foreground and the Great Sand Sea beyond the last of the oasis.

It’s uncanny to look around you at open desert landscape, with palm groves and mud-walled villages dotted for kilometers around, and know that it was once the bed of an ocean. That seems to explain the deep layers of salt in the soil that the Siwi people have dug up to use as building materials over the past few centuries. Today, salt is dug and harvested to be shipped to Europe for de-icing roads, or to be crafted into salt lamps and salt rooms. The salt lakes of Siwa are growing larger as salt water seeps up from the water table, encroaching on both desert and cultivated land. Perhaps the ocean is stealthily returning. Someday, in a far-distant century, divers could discover signs of a lost civilization – a new Atlantis – in the place once known as the Libyan Desert.

As you stand on the peaks of Gebel el Dakrur, winds gust around you, seizing your scarf and blasting dust into your face. Surrounded by tombs, standing on untold billions of fossils of long-dead creatures, and buffeted by mischievous winds, it’s easy to understand why Gebel el Dakrur has a local reputation for being inhabited by afrit, or demons. The first time we climbed one of the peaks, we could see a dark cloudlike haze gathering on the horizon, shrouding some of the distant view. It brewed up into a dark, dramatic sandstorm by early evening; later, as we sipped tea in the town square, we saw the sun disappear into the sandstorm, more than half an hour before sunset. The wind funneled down the narrow main street of Siwa Town, blasting election posters with dust, tossing loose rubbish into the air, and chasing the few remaining donkey carts and three-wheelers making quickly for home.

5 thoughts on “Fossils, tombs and demons: exploring Gebel el Dakrur”

You certainly have stimulated my interest in Siwa. I read pretty much every “fossil book” in the Vernon branch library in Portland when I was in grade school. At the time, I didn’t realize that I would have to travel to drier climes to find some of the things I was seeing.

Hi Tom — Did you ever get out to Fossil, Oregon, to see the fossils there and in the surrounding John Day area? It’s amazing. Personally, I find I’m even more interested in fossils now than I have been before. There’s something perhaps about finding them where you least expect them.